Friday, Sep 5, 2008
Ad was from hell, but so is the lawsuit; Horowitz should blame GOP for security lapses.
Jun 4, 1999 | The ad from hell
BY RUTH SHALIT
(05/28/99)
In his lawsuit against ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi, Just for Feet CEO Harold Ruttenberg says that although he had serious misgivings about the ad, Saatchi & Saatchi "badgered" him into going with it. How did this timid, defenseless, meek little guy get to be CEO of a $750 million company? Even more amazing is the fact that he is also suing Fox for not having aired the commercial in the third quarter, which generally has more viewer hits than the fourth quarter. So what we have here is a CEO who is suing one party for allegedly causing grievous damage to his company, and is suing another party because the alleged damage wasn't as much as it might otherwise have been. Is Ruttenberg a CEO who blames others for his own acts of gross incompetence at the helm?
-- Michael R. DiBlasio
I am appalled that the lawsuit against the agency is moving forward. The consensus that the ad should have never run, during the Super Bowl or at any other time, is not the issue at hand. Ultimately, Just For Feet signed off on producing and running the spot. The creatives may have badgered the executives to move forward with the ad, but that violates neither any law nor the agency/client contract I'm sure the two parties have. The staff at Saatchi & Saatchi would not have stopped working on a million-dollar spot set to air during the biggest TV event of the year just because the client decided to kill their first (and ultimately misguided) concept.
As nauseating as a blatantly distasteful commercial is, yet another frivolous lawsuit is even harder to stomach.
-- Rob Baird
Art Director
West & Vaughan Advertising
The ad may have been from hell, but the free publicity is from heaven. I never heard of Just for Feet until I read your article. I hope Harold Ruttenberg is victorious in court -- creativity need not pander to racist images in advertising. Even more injurious to Just for Feet was Fox's shifting of the ad to the fourth quarter when Just for Feet had newspaper ads promoting the commercials in the third quarter. If there's any justice, Saatchi & Saatchi should be obliged to create a new ad for Just for Feet, at Saatchi's expense, to Ruttenberg's satisfaction, with Fox airing the spot as a "make good" in its next ratings-bonanza sporting event.
-- Lori R. Price
Bristol, Conn.
Sincere meditations
BY ANNE LAMOTT
(05/27/99)
Anne Lamott and all those captivated by David Roche must read Mario Vargas Llosa's beautiful short novel "The Storyteller," the astoundingly parallel story of a Peruvian with a raised, purple, disfiguring birthmark on half of his face, who becomes a storyteller among a primitive Amazon tribe, "the figure ancestrally entrusted with the task of arousing the curiosity, the fantasy, the memory, the appetite for dreams and fabrication" of his people. What more fitting description of Roche, or of a writer like Lamott?
-- Beth LaDow
Winchester, Mass.
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